Transparency is good and produces environments in which communication is possible and trust can be built. Lack of transparency in the output of colleagues/managers/reports leads to the classic “Everyone thinks they do most of the chores” bias, decreases trust in the efficacy of others, creates resentment, lowers trust, decreases collaboration, and generally leads to spiraling distrust and breakdown of communication and death of the organization.
I’ve seen this happen in many organizations. Resentment built up over months as a manager consistently felt his report was underperforming, worried that this was because he was not putting in the hours of the effort expected, and started growing distrustful and antagonistic.
First, if you end up in this situation, the only way out is clear communication, blameless postmortems, focusing on concrete next steps for the future rather than over-diagnosing the past, and having a base assumption that people are not psychopath and actually care about stuff, from which trust can be rebuilt.
But the best way to not end up in this situation is to have a much higher transparency in colleague and management relationships. With full clarity into someone’s work output and the underlying reasons for specific day-to-day variance, discrepancies between expectations and the reality of the work performed can be noticed quickly, before they become a big thing, and through communication, expectations and strategies can be adjusted to match once again.
The main issue I’ve seen preventing this from happening is insecurity. If you don’t trust that it’s going to be helpful, appreciated and encouraged to be transparent, you won’t do it.
It’s very easy for a manager to accidentally incentivize lying. For example, if they’re bad at tracking their reports progress on their goal, they may feel like everything is fine until some explicit signal shows them that something is wrong. So, if the report has not been making the expected progress, as long as they don’t say anything about it they don’t get the talk, but as soon as they say something, suddenly they’re under the spotlight and examined as to why they are failing at their task. In this case, reporting the issue is leading to worse outcome than staying silent, so lies of omission are the default outcome.
The other main one I’ve seen is people who have learned in past jobs that it is not safe to be transparent about their progress, and are still executing scripts of hiding progress and avoiding scrutiny, even if their current organization would genuinely appreciate and support transparency. In this case, the way out is to actively encourage transparency, have managers and other culture ambassadors demonstrate it by practicing this transparency themselves and showing that it is appreciated and rewarded.
My process of sharing daily progress has usually been sending a Slack message at the end of the day, with a list of things I managed to do, unplanned work I did, tasks I did not get to, and some updates about what’s happening for me, how the day went, what I learned, and what I expect going forward.
The software I’ve used for tracking and sending those updated has been:
Sunsama, a daily planner I’ve used a lot when working remotely on projects for a client. It has a built-in daily reflection feature that you can send to Slack with just one button
Intend.do, a daily intention setting and fractal goal review system that I’ve been using whenever I’m in a more exploratory phase and optimizing for multiple goals at once. My work is usually one of the goals, and at the end of the day I run a script of my own which extracts my outcomes and send a Slack message for me